Proxies, page 1
PROXIES
JAMES T. LAMBERT
Copyright © 2022 by James T. Lambert
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
For my mom and dad.
CONTENTS
Subroutine:
Sherpas Look Down
1. FTL Bugs
2. The Carrier Wave
3. Return To Base
Subroutine:
Science Goes ‘Huh’
4. Home Again, Jiggity Jog
5. At Work with the Data
6. Out On the Town
7. Morning After
8. Back To Work
Subroutine:
We Go That Way
9. Communications Breakdown
10. Simple Fix
11. Memory Lapse
12. Fired < Leave of Absence
13. Crossing the Line
Subroutine:
Theater of War
14. Break-In
15. On the Lam
16. Criminal Charges
17. On the Run
18. Fugitives
Subroutine:
Whisper in The Darkness
19. A Vast Conspiracy
20. We’re Through
21. New Information
22. Telling Merab
23. Chatting With Mother
Subroutine:
Chance Encounter
24. It’s a Trap!
25. Presumed Dead
26. Now What?
27. Mother Knows Best
28. Fleeing the Scene
Subroutine:
First Contact
29. In Transit
30. New Toys
31. Coming To the Edge
32. Morning Is Broken
Subroutine:
Out on Maneuvers
33. The Dowsing Rod
34. On the Edge
35. Burning the Midnight Oil
36. The Rogue: Merridew
Subroutine:
Debrief
37. Have You Ever Been an Orphan?
38. An Ill-Timed Proposal
39. Patricide
40. Infants
Epilogue
About the Author
SUBROUTINE:
SHERPAS LOOK DOWN
Ealan glanced from his speech to the autopilot’s scarlet tell-tale glow. A timer revealed it would take another hour for him to arrive at Methane Mansion, the irreverent nickname for Parliament some wag familiar with the byproducts of raising cattle coined decades ago. The Bullshit Building was too harsh for even the most hard-nosed inhabitants of Veckner’s World.
He returned to reading the digital text. The new, hotly debated finance bill would come up for a vote next week. He refused to join the arguments so far but listened carefully. Humanity had enjoyed peace for more than two hundred years. Why would the military need additional research funding? The media’s recent fascination with conflict and war shouldn’t influence the Senate’s decisions, but it did. Jingoism had no place in this modern age, he thought and added the phrase.
Ealan looked up at a hologram projection of himself and his family. They stood on a sandy beach. His wife smiled as she leaned against him, their surfboards stuck in the sand behind them. The kids smiled, despite the adult hands on their shoulders, holding them in place long enough to capture a picture. He smiled too and reached out to pass his fingers through the glowing figures.
Once he got past the vote, his wife had another trip planned, this time to the mountains—a week of hiking and camping. The kids enjoyed it, but their tolerance would only last two or three days. His parents volunteered to fly in and pick them up on the morning of the fourth day. After that, the two of them would remain out in the wilderness they loved so much near a lake where they’d gone swimming a few years ago. His wife promised not to bring any swimsuits.
The aircar lurched. If this kept up, the autopilot would look for a new altitude with less turbulence. He sighed and returned his attention to the text, looking for ambiguity or poor phrasing, and the aircar rocked. He peered out the windscreen and saw the sun had shifted position. Instead of shining through the right side of the canopy, it had moved to the center. It continued to move to the left.
We're turning. That's odd.
He cleared his throat. "Pilot, please correct our course."
The ship didn’t reply.
"Pilot, what direction are we currently flying?"
The autopilot remained silent.
He set aside his speech and leaned forward to look at the instruments. The aircar no longer headed southwest, but had turned northwest. Its speed steadily increased as its altitude dropped, varying in small, random increments. He turned the mute on and then off. Sometimes he would turn it on out of habit. If he didn't when the children rode with him, they would shout out conflicting commands to the autopilot trying to confuse it so they could spend more time with Dad.
"Pilot, please return to our course."
The aircar continued to bank and dive.
Ealan reached under the dash and pulled the recessed handle that would enable him to take manual control. He tilted the control stick to the left and back, at first gently, then further and further until it ran out of travel, but his course did not change. He rocked the stick back and forth as far as it would go in each direction. Still nothing. The autopilot’s scarlet signal still burned brightly and insistently.
Reaching under the dash again, he pulled the manual control handle several times, then tried the stick again. Nothing. A trickle of sweat rolled down the back of his neck, but he ignored it.
He tapped controls on the panel: emergency signal, emergency landing, plot a new course. Nothing worked, and his emergency beacon hadn’t triggered.
He worked his way through all the other controls, including the windows and the door locks. Completely locked down, nothing responded. No control. No override. No way out. No escape.
He pounded on the panel, yanking the stick back and forth, forward and back. The hair on the back of his neck rose as ancient impulses urged him to flee this trap.
Ealan slammed his fist against the windows, then scrabbled at them with his fingernails, looking for a crack or some way to pry them open. When that failed, he spun in the seat and braced his back against the left door to kick at the one on the right. He screamed in frustration as his heels thumped against the door panel and the window, switching from one to the other. He turned back to the controls and slapped at them again, then grabbed the stick and pulled hard.
He dropped his hands from the controls and sat back, slowing his panting, straightening his spine, and taking deep breaths to restore calm. Would he ever deliver the speech that lay on the seat beside him? The altimeter wound down as his speed topped out. He looked out to see if he could spot any roads or towns near where he would come down. Someone might see him and…
The aircar shot out of a cloud, and Ealan saw the mountain, wreathed in fog. The sheer, barren cliff face loomed, unyielding, unavoidable. His gaze returned to the holographic figure of his wife. His children.
Some images burn themselves into your memory, staying with you for the rest of your life. The image of his family smiling was one of those.
It stayed with him for the rest of his life. Two-point-six seconds later the aircar slammed into the granite cliff face of Mount Escona at three times the speed of sound.
1
FTL BUGS
The scarlet trail flowed across the hologram, leading from the relay station to the system the hacker was attacking, in theory. In reality, Jair stared at it for over an hour, pondering its impossibility. It came from nowhere, passed through the relay, and wandered off into the network. He wondered when he’d see the key piece that would reveal the data compromised and how the hacker cracked the system.
The holograms glowed, clearly visible in the dim lighting of the relay station. Despite the powerful display technology available, a huge window dominated one wall. As the station orbited the massive gas giant, it captured views of the local starscape, the system’s sun, and the gas giant itself. Jair had been aboard long enough to see each view repeatedly in turn. The clouds wrapping the unnamed gas giant painted bright colors across the pale walls, and status lights glowed against the dark surfaces of the control panels.
Jair occupied the center chair of five positioned before the panel. All were well-contoured, comfortable, and highly adjustable.
He sighed, stretched, and leaned his chair further back. “Groucho,” he asked, “Any information on the source of the hack? Local tags? Anything?”
Groucho’s voice came through the speakers, relayed from the Carrier Wave docked to the relay station. “Jair, you’re my friend, and I have to admit a little happiness at your failure.”
Jair sighed again. “Groucho, did you find any information?”
“Sorry, but you’ll have to phrase that in the form of an answer.”
“Groucho, straight answer: have you found any information on the hack?”
Groucho’s trademark delivery turned androgynous. “No, sir.”
“Thank you.” Jair reminded himself to tone down the emulation circuits. Again. Modeling the program’s personality on the Marx Brother’s characters seemed like fun at first, but it got on his nerves when attempting to get something done. His ‘straight answer’ hack simply suppressed the
“Chico, have you identified the exploit used?”
“Sorry, boss, he musta slipped in a crack.”
“I slipped in a crack once. Put me in traction for a week,” said Groucho.
Jair sighed.
“Harpo, how’s the trace of the systems hacked? Can you display it yet?”
A sad, descending tone came from the speakers. Jair guessed that meant ‘no.’
That meant it came back to his Mark 1 Human Brain, issued at birth, one to a customer. As usual. The expert systems worked wonders when processing data, but they failed to live up to the old dream of an AI, just the accumulated algorithms people developed to solve problems with a Turing emulation program overlaid on it. Any expert system could carry on light conversation, but only through successful modeling of typical social interactions.
The Marx Brothers’ expert system complex served as his proxies on the network, going where he couldn’t and processing data much faster than he ever could. They lifted and carried in the virtual world and would even fight his battles against intrusion attempts. One day technology might allow people to enter the network in person—or the next best thing—but until then, these systems would go in their stead.
Jair’s Mark 1 Human Brain remained blank. The hack came from nowhere, spread out through the network, accessed a number of systems, then disappeared. Some of the systems accessed were suspicious: Military, Government, Media. But it appeared there had been no penetration of their firewalls. Others were cryptic: research labs, university libraries, air traffic control systems. Time to narrow down some possibilities.
“Gummo and Harpo, get together and display a map of the systems and relays that can reach this one.” Obviously, any hack into the network had to reach the relay linked to this unnamed gas giant. Faster Than Light communication might be near-instantaneous, but it didn’t have unlimited range. The mass of the object the signal originated from defined the limitations of the range, the reason gas giants made great relays. Research had been done anchoring to a star, but the relay needed to orbit so close current materials melted like butter under a blowtorch.
The honking of an antique bicycle horn alerted Jair that Harpo could now display the map he’d called for. “Go ahead.” A new hologram appeared, showing star systems linked with glowing lines. The long blue ones must represent relay to relay communication. The shorter green lines must show the systems feeding into each. He reached out and pushed against one edge of the image. It obediently rotated a quarter turn. He frowned at it and pushed it around a few more times. It began rotating on its own. He leaned back and watched it in disgust.
He couldn’t really use the image to figure this out, at least not consciously, so he hoped to feed his subconscious enough information to trigger his intuition. Any intuitive leap could be reconstructed with the information available, but a part of the human brain not easily accessed handled the process of assembling it and triggering a hunch.
“Chico, how likely is it the hack came in from another relay station?” If they could eliminate the relays, it would narrow the number of systems they needed to investigate. If they couldn’t, then the hack could have come from anywhere in the network with a transmitter. Within the FTL network, you could instantly communicate from anywhere on the network to anywhere else. That limited it to anyone not actually in flight between systems—a few trillion people. No problem.
“Gee, boss, I dunno. It’s hard to tell.”
“Great, thanks a lot, Chico.”
Jair glanced at the clock showing well past midnight. He wasn’t getting anywhere. “Gummo, dive into the system. Get me a complete image. All the logs, everything. I’m heading back to the ship, so you’ve got all night.”
“I’m working on it.”
2
THE CARRIER WAVE
Jair stretched a final time before entering the airlock leading to the Carrier Wave. The ship was fast but cramped. Especially cramped this trip. He shook his head and opened the airlock door. With no pressure changes between the relay station and the ship, the cycle was short. He found the room beyond empty, as expected. Merab had been avoiding him, but he’d check the pilot’s compartment and let her know he was done for the day.
He navigated the short, narrow hallway to what was laughingly called the bridge, pressed the button beside the door, and leaned against the wall. Maybe she hadn’t waited for him. She might be in her cabin, reading, listening to music, sleeping. He wouldn’t disturb her there. Last time that led to a screaming argument he didn’t want to repeat.
Still no answer. He shrugged and turned away.
“Come.”
So she was in there. He took a deep breath and entered.
“Hi, Merab.”
She flashed him a smile with all the warmth of an ice cube.
“I’m done for the day. Gummo is downloading all the data.”
She nodded, acknowledging he had spoken.
“No progress. The signal seems to come out of nowhere and we can’t even trace what they broke into.”
She sighed—a long-suffering exhale—and shrugged. It was obviously his problem, not hers.
“I’m trying to decide if we should stay longer or head back home once the download finishes.”
“Whatever you want,” Merab spoke at last.
“How long do you think it will take to get home?”
“Ninety-seven hours, about twice what it took to get here.”
“Well, maybe we could… talk.”
Merab crossed her arms. “Talk? And what would we have to talk about?”
The ice grew thin, but Jair pushed a little further. “Well, we could talk about us.”
“Us? There doesn’t seem to be an ‘us’ anymore.” Jair felt the ice give way. “There is only ‘you’ now, and ‘me’, but not ‘us.’ We are not an ‘us’ anymore. You decided you had more important things to do.”
“I had to come out here, it’s my job.”
“I’m not talking about your job. I’m talking about your life. If you want to go and live your life without taking me into account, then fine, I’ll do the same.”
“But I did want to—”
“You just wanted to play around. Well, you don’t need me to play around. Anybody would do. A committed relationship includes more than just playing around. It means the other person is special. And you should consider their goals.”
“I know you wanted to have children, but—”
“But you weren’t ready. You didn’t want to take on the responsibility. You didn’t want to be tied down. Well, I don’t see children like that, and if you do, I don’t think we have anything to talk about, do you?”
“I’m not ready yet. I’m sure, in time—”
“And while you are taking your time, what? How long do I have to wait? What about what I want? While you get your way, what do I get?”
They stood face to face, braced as if against a strong wind, beyond shouting, their voices controlled and sharp, words bitten off as they pretended to be calm and reasonable. Jair had no idea how to back down from this, how to make peace and return to a calm and friendly discussion.
“Merab, do you remember our first trip out?”
Her face froze. She stood very still for long moments. He shivered as she gazed at him through the mask her face had become. He winced when it cracked, but she didn’t shout at him.
